The proliferation of television channels of every nature provided by content providers, such as satellite TV and cable TV companies, to subscribers has become more of a burden than an asset. The average subscriber is forced to wade through sometimes hundreds of channels to find and view a handful of preferred channels. Considering that Americans watch an average of between 2 and 5 hours of TV per day, the time spent “channel surfing” can be considerable. Forcing customers to pay for unwanted and unviewed channels is, perhaps, even more of an affront than the time they waste browsing through them. It is desirable to offer a subscriber only the channels [s]he is interested in.
Another disadvantage of the television-viewing systems as they exist today is the unidirectional flow of information. Pay-per-view technologies, which capture a minute amount of customer input, have existed in one form or another for some time. It is desirable to be able to receive a significant amount of customer input to include enabling interactive communication and collecting user preferences among other things.
Television (including CATV, satellite, web-casts, pay-per-view programming, etc.) advertising comprises a significant portion of the television-viewing experience. Advertising executives spend a great deal of time and money creating effective and targeted advertising campaigns. Even still, much of their effort is wasted on disinterested consumers. Advertising to interested consumers is a more effective use of advertising resources. It is desirable to use recent advances in communications technology to improve the effectiveness of advertising. Other business methods have successfully harnessed new technologies for the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of advertising such as Engle et al. who teaches an electronic coupon distribution system in U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,830.
The modern communications boom can trace its roots to the 1870's following the issue of U.S. Pat. No. 174,465 to A. G. Bell, which teaches a method of, and an apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically. The first telephone company quickly followed and, since that time, the American telephone system has become reliable and widespread. Cable and satellite television services emerged 100 years later but are not as widely available as telephone service. It is desirable to provide media to customers over Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) communication lines, especially where cable and satellite television transmission is unavailable. Areas without cable television service or satellite television service typically have limited reception of traditional broadcast television signals. In addition, in areas where many distribution systems of media (broadcast television and radio, cable television and stereo, satellite television and stereo) are available to a customer, no system exists to supply video-on-demand directly to a customer's media-rendering system. Currently, customers must wait until a time specified by the content provider or content distributor to receive the desired media content.